Dance Party USA in 1987

There is a year in every show's run where it stops being the new thing on the channel and starts being the reason people turn the channel on. For Dance Party USA that year was 1987. It got bigger, it got longer, and by New Year's Eve it had outlived the show that made it.

1987 was the peak year of Dance Party USA. The show outgrew the half-hour it launched in and expanded on the schedule, the guest bookings got stronger, and on December 31, 1987, its Philadelphia predecessor Dancin' On Air went off the air for good. The national show it had spawned kept running for another four and a half years. Andy Gury hosted throughout.

The expansion

The single hardest piece of evidence for what 1987 was is the format change. Dance Party USA launched in April 1986 as a half-hour, and the listings from that first summer confirm it plainly: a thirty-minute program at 7:00 on the USA Network with another show taking the 7:30 slot. In 1987 that ended. The show expanded past the half-hour and never went back to it.

Networks do not lengthen a daily strip out of sentiment. They do it when the thing is working, when the slot is worth more filled by that show than by whatever else was going to run there. The expansion is the closest thing the record offers to a ratings statement, and it happened in 1987.

The year Dancin' On Air ended

The other defining event of 1987 is the one that gets missed, because it looks like a loss.

Dancin' On Air had been on WPHL-TV Channel 17 in Philadelphia since October 12, 1981. It was the original, the show that Michael and Frank Nise built, the one that gave Dance Party USA its format, its set, its studio, and its cast. Across 1986 and 1987 the two programs ran out of the same room, and audiences saw the same regulars and the same guests on both.

On December 31, 1987, Dancin' On Air broadcast for the last time.

That closes the strangest chapter of the operation and leaves Dance Party USA standing on its own for the first time. The show that had started as the national spin-off of a local hit finished 1987 as the only one of the pair still running. Philadelphia magazine, looking back on both shows in 2016, described what had happened in plain terms: Dancin' On Air "eventually got syndicated in 1986, and morphed into Dance Party USA, which became a huge hit for cable's then-fledgling USA Network."

What the tape from 1987 looks like

Surviving 1987 footage shows a show with more to spend and more to book. The year's tape includes a Christmas special, and performances from the freestyle and dance acts that were the format's natural fit, among them Exposé, The Cover Girls, and Evelyn Thomas, along with a sit-down interview with The Jets. The countdown segments that became a fixture of the show's later years are already running.

Andy Gury hosted across the year, three years into the run he had started in 1986 and two years before the hosting change that would define 1989. On the floor, the regulars were the draw they had been from the start: Bobby Catalano, a regular since his 1985 start on Dancin' On Air, Jason Pascoe in the middle of his 1986 to 1988 run, and a teenage Kelly Ripa.

The honest bottom line

Calling 1987 the golden year is a judgment, but it is not a sentimental one, and the record carries it. The show got longer, which networks only do when a show earns it. It absorbed the audience of the program it had been sharing a studio with, and then that program ended and this one did not. The guest bookings from the year are the strongest of the run. What 1987 does not have is a paper trail proportional to its size, because daily cable dance shows were not covered seriously by anyone at the time. The evidence is the schedule, the format change, and the tape, and all three point the same way.

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